Boring Co. gets permission to begin digging in Maryland
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
"Hogan administration officials said Thursday the state has issued a conditional utility permit to let Musk’s tunneling firm, The Boring Co., dig a 10.3-mile tunnel beneath the state-owned portion of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, between the Baltimore city line and Maryland 175 in Hanover."
Sure, with increased efficiency and better energy economics, that's not a problem.
Sure tons of cost for R&D but just because the tunnels are smaller doesn't mean they could only be used for cars in the long term.
You can see one in the CG demo, in the first few seconds of the video, on the right:
So about 250 - 700 people are moved in 3 minutes, that's 80-230 per minute. If sleds follow each other by let's say 2-3 seconds, and each car holds 1-8 people, then that's 20-240 people per minute. With the added benefit better granularity, and you don't have to switch lines, metros, you don't even have to leave your seat.
Also modern subway tunnels are typically constructed with a larger diameter than what the Boring company supports.
That said, I don't think American cities could run subway cars as small as in the London Underground even if they wanted to because of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Also, it might be difficult to make cars that small that pass muster under Federal safety regulations. AFAIU, Federal regulations basically require subway cars to be built like tanks.
EDIT: >24 feet just seems too wide for the old, deep tunnels in the U.S., but I can't find any references that aren't from books at the turn of the 20th century, which have very inconsistent numbers. I said >24 because that seem to be the width of old cut-and-cover tunnels and newer deep tunnels. I'm going to go out on a limb--based on random sources--and guess that the really old tunnels still in use might be closer to 16 feet in diameter. Feel free to correct me.
Tunneling within city limits may resolve that.
I mean, electric cars, then autonomous cars, solar roofs, batteries, hyperloops, boring company, send humans to the space and back.
Isn’t too much to accredit one person?
I also don’t agree with your logic of … A person shouldn’t accomplish too much in life? Is that what you are saying?
The “solar roof” is more of a gimmic those tiles are less efficient than other roof mounted cells but they at least are not as ugly so they are a luxury item for people who want to have a nice looking roof over their nice looking house.
They also might be a way to get solar installed in some places with very strict homeowners association regulations but they aren’t exactly a paradigm shifting innovation.
The Boring Company and the hyperloop might again flop and yes this isn’t as important as SpaceX or Tesla as far as worldwide impact goes but it’s an important step at taking a new approach at the US mass public transport problem.
Hyperloop is less important to other parts of the world like Japan or Europe which already have pretty decent high speed rail systems but it might be important for developing regions like Africa, India and China.
Many times before pioneers and early innovators were side lined due to various reasons but their impact is not any less meaningful becuase of that.
Even if Tesla disappears in 10 years it sparked an arms race in the car industry and even if it flops next year it’s too late for all the other car manufacturers to backtrack on their commitments and investments in getting EV out to the masses.
If SpaceX fails it did showed that commercial space flight is possible and that reusing rockets can be done on a commercial and economical scale.
For all that either company can still achieve they’ve done more than enough on their part already.
As for the Boring company it might fail in a way that some one would pick up the mantle and refine the concept, it might fail in a way that would make people say whelp... this won’t work let’s build a high speed rail system finally but at least it’s not a $400 juice bag squeezer or yet another wireless speaker.
How is that limit set?
Let's say it realistically costs $150 million a mile for the project (about average for tunnel boring - it'll actually be a lot more on the east coast due to it being solid rock and expensive labor, but let's be realistically optimistic). At 250 miles, that's $37.5 Billion right there. Let's be ridiculously generous and finance this over 50 years. Over 50 years, that's $750 million/year. Or, $2million/day. At $60/ticket, you need 34k daily riders.
And that's only for building the tunnel. I haven't even factored in operating or finance costs, nevermind the millions of other expenses that this needs. Stations are normally the most expensive part of a system, for example, and a station in NYC might cost $1 billion by itself.
Is this going to get 34,000 daily riders paying $60/ticket to NYC? I can see that happening with $10/ticket, but not at $60/ticket. For comparison, the entire DC Metro system itself has about 800k daily riders with about $5/trip.
And then you have the stupid HyperLoop concept itself, which hasn't even been invented yet. It's based on small single-car vehicles, which may carry a couple dozen people at most. Already you can see capacity issues: To get 34,000 people a day 24-7, you need 1400 fully-packed rides a day, or one every 6 seconds. You're not going to get single-vehicles to share a track every six seconds. You're already capacity limited. How do you even slow down? Ingress/egress?
And the concept itself is horrific: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk
Like WTF people? How are there adults that believe any of this garbage?
If you know anyone in your company that believes in this, just fire them on the spot. Make examples out of them. There's no excuse for this.
Stick with what works: high-speed rail, which can transport a thousand people or more in one trip and doesn't need some dumb vacuum tube. This is the real competition for this.
Larry Hogan has failed Maryland.
And Elon Musk is the worst thing to happen to tech.
Your entire post lacks vision because it assumes fixed costs. Also, where did you get the $150M/mi from anyway? Your whole post seems to stem from a fixed number you pulled out of thin air.
When you have vision, you're supposed to look at the complete system, not just the parts you conveniently like.
You're supposed to understand where the problems are, not just where the benefits are.
People that don't understand systems don't have vision.
> Currently, tunnels are really expensive to dig, with some projects costing as much as $1 billion per mile. In order to make a tunnel network feasible, tunneling costs must be reduced by a factor of more than 10.
So, a factor of 10 is $100m, but we don't know what "or more" means at this point.
New York City and Washington, D.C. are 229 miles apart [2]. The Acela has ridership of 3.47 million per year [3], or about 951 on average per day. Acela tickets cost no less than $99 [4]. Plugging in we find the cost per mile can be no more than $7.5 million.
That is 30% the cost per mile of the cheapest tunnel, the Shanghai River Crossing, and 5% the cost per mile of the median tunnel in Figure 5 [5]. On the other hand, the Falcon 9's list price [6] per pound to low-earth orbit is about $1,230. That's approximately 70% to 85% cheaper than the competition [7].
Naturally, you'd charge less than $99 and hope for more than a thousand daily riders. The trick is finding routes for which the price elasticity of demand is high, i.e. where reducing the ticket price by 1/2 generates more than a 2x demand boost.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15519733
[2] https://www.travelmath.com/drive-distance/from/New+York,+NY/...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express
[4] http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Amtrak-Lowers-Acela-...
[5] https://tunneltalk.com/TunnelTECH-Apr2015-Arup-large-diamete...
[6] http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities
[7] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_VyTCyizqrHs/S9IabKEr1nI/AAAAAAAAHb...
Also I'm sure the Boring Company is hiring people with experience in tunneling since that's what every company does. Hires people with experience in the field.
The only real benefit that came from the EV1 was the Toyota Prius. Because Toyota thought the US was serious about The Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles and they built the Prius to compete.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnership_for_a_New_Genera...
Didn’t know at the time they would be the only ones to show up...
Suppose they can do it for $75 million/mile. That gives us tunnelling costs of $250 billion, or about 1 million a day if financed for free over 50 years.
If we assume he wants to move sledded cars instead of passenger vehicles, a ticket price of $120 per transported car seems reasonable to me. That means he needs about 8300 cars/day, or on average 6 per minute. Transporting cars should also cuts down on station costs.
If he wants to transport passengers, at ten per hyperloop vehicle, $60 per person, that's one full vehicle per minute, not that far from some subway lines.
It's doable, but far fetched. I consider his plan to put humans on Mars within 7 years more realistic (but only very slightly so). But in any case people trying is not the worst thing to happen to tech, it's the essence of tech.
1: https://www.boringcompany.com/faq/ ($1 billion/mile reduced by factor >10)
People might begin storing vehicles in buildings more often in places like Manhattan if any of this stuff works. You then leave Manhattan with your car by linking into the transport tunnels, driving wherever you please from there. It wouldn't be difficult to add floors to new buildings just for automated vehicle storage, with a tunnel linked right to a given building that has vehicle storage.
If I'm from Pennsylvania and I want to go to Manhattan for a weekend, I put my car on a sled, go into Manhattan via tunnel, park my sled/car in building storage linked to a tunnel, then do whatever in Manhattan. Then reverse the process for leaving. Dramatically more convenient than the way things are now.
Maybe it ends up making more sense to have the bulk of vehicle storage just outside of expensive real-estate zones, so the sleds into Manhattan are multi-person carriers instead. Then you take a multi-person carrier sled back to wherever you stored your vehicle. Either way.
The bigger problem is that I casually listed average vehicles per minute, but in practice you likely have barley any traffic at night and four times the average during peak hours.
Also "finance over 50 years for free" is a giant stretch. Even at a theoretical 0% interest rate the opportunity cost makes this much more expensive in reality.
I would say the worst are the people who religiously believe everything he says, independent of any constraints or consideration of reality. I think he does undeniably accomplish some pretty amazing stuff, but that doesn't make me blind to his more idiotic ideas.
My favorite symptom of Elons delusions of grandeur so far, is his announcement to wanting to utilizing rockets as a means for intercontinental transportation, "London to New York rocket flights in 29 minutes". Maybe we can find some volunteers for a few test flights in a falcon 9? [http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41441877]